The last battle

By Gideon HaighJuly 8 2002

BERLIN: THE DOWNFALL 1945, By Antony Beevor, Viking, $50

Restraint in war is imbecility,'' said Lord Fisher. But the Royal Navy's
great architect could scarcely have imagined a war so unrestrained, so bestial,
as that waged on Berlin by the Red Army in April and May, 1945. Vengeful
Russians fell upon the Third Reich with hate in their hearts and testosterone in
their veins, not only killing hundreds of thousands of men but raping about two
million women.

It is a story that appears to share more with the sack of Rome than with the
20th century. The invaders looted everything not nailed down, then some things
that were, then finally the nails too: bags of nails, not to mention panes of
glass, were among the items sent home to the soldiers' deprived peasant
families. Even their commander, Zhukov, made off with suitcases of plunder.

Telling the tale again, in what will assuredly become the most popular
version, is Antony Beevor, whose runaway bestseller Stalingrad was
acclaimed three years ago as having single-handedly rejuvenated the narrative
history of war.

Frankly, I felt Stalingrad rather overpraised. Meticulous as it was,
it is far from the best book about the siege, and obtained its power from the
extremity of the events rather than any particular brilliance in their
description. That baby-boomers had suddenly discovered the pleasures of ``maps
and chaps'' military history seemed simply one of those occasional unaccountable
reading phenomena, like people queuing up to read Bill Bryson's joke repeated
for the 10th consecutive book.

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But boomers are a fickle lot and I wonder if Berlin will do as well, being
largely devoid of heroes and heroism, and unyieldingly unpleasant in its
contents. What may also impair its chance of repeating Stalingrad's
success, given the strange topsy-turveydom that operates in the world of the
bestseller, is that it's a better book.

Berlin is as disorienting, and dramatic, as walking into a movie
towards the end. Quotidian realities have strayed far from normality. Men on
bicycles attack tanks. Cyanide tablets are distributed at the opera. ``Doctor,''
inquires Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels of the Fuhrer's surgeon,
``I would be very grateful if you would help my wife kill the children.'' A
Gestapo operative explains a new policy of lenience towards its captives:
``We're sparing these ones as proof that we shot no prisoners.''

It is as though not only civilisation has been suspended by common consent,
but sense as well.

There's still a war going on, of course, and Beevor shows a sharp eye for
telling detail. He describes how the Reich's last reserves of teenage trainee
soldiers found rifle butts too long for their young arms; he has us admiring
Russian engineers for crossing rivers with bridges built 30 centimetres below
water level so as to be invisible from the air.

But Beevor is best of all on the disintegration of military discipline amid
what it was clear were war's last throes, how the Germans summarily tried and
executed about 10,000 of their own men in increasingly desperate efforts to
force the rest to fight, how the Russians roved the city displaying ``an utterly
bewildering mixture of irrational violence, drunken lust and spontaneous
kindness to children''.

The scale of the sexual violation beggars belief: a substantial minority of
the two million women raped suffered more than once. Often it was a matter of
surrendering to rape to save husbands and families; in years to come, the
euphemism became common: ``Unfortunately I had to concede.''

Beevor's interpretation of these events isn't as convincing as his
investigation. That ``most ill-educated Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual
ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes towards women'' sounds rather like
the condescension of posterity, and that ``indisciplined soldiers without fear
of retribution can rapidly revert to primitive male sexuality . . . which
biologists ascribe to a compulsion on the part of the male of the species to
spread his seed as widely as possible'' is as banal as the idea that all men are
potential rapists.

The general savagery and lawlessness of the fall of Berlin seems rather to
demonstrate how completely prolonged combat enslaves its participants. The
four-year Great Patriotic War not only cost 11.3 million Russian lives but
stripped survivors of all inhibitions.

Violence insinuated itself into every action; the desire for sex became rape
in the same casually brutal way that soldiers, to use a mundane example, opened
cans of condensed milk by stabbing them with bayonets rather than using tin
openers.

In describing the propaganda activities of both Goebbels and Russia's Ilya
Ehrenburg, Beevor also illustrates how radical had become the gap in
understanding between the combatants: quite simply, Russia and Germany collided
as cultures that did not recognise the other as human.

This matters. The most resonant remark in Berlin is uttered by a
Russian divisional commander reporting the sight of a group of German children
crying: ``What was surprising was that they were crying in exactly the same way
as our children cry.''

Funny old world. Come to think of it, those refugee children cry rather
convincingly too, don't they?